Book review: Loop by Koji Suzuki

I knew eventually I’d have to read Loop to complete this series, but when I initially couldn’t find a copy of it anywhere, I opted to Wiki it, and read the basic synopsis. It put me off of reading it, so I figured I’d just set aside until I forgot the finer points of the synopsis.

I finally reached that point and got started, and for the first 400 pages, I didn’t feel anything at all. While I felt the first books were creepy and scary in some parts, if a bit dry, this book is dry as a bone left in the middle of a desert, and there’s nothing I can feel for the story or the characters. Kaoru is a bland character, and his “loving dad,” Hideyuki, comes off as creepy, but isn’t quite creepy enough to provoke a reaction. His mother Machiko is flat and more a background noise than a functioning character, and his romantic interest, Reiko, is seduced in a clinical description that makes their first time together sound like rape. Following intimate scenes and thoughts are worded in such a way as to negate any stimulating reaction. Passages speak of a woman’s “sex organ” and her “fluids” in such a way that all I could do was shake my head at the consistently clinical tone.

And then the punchline came, and I got pissed. I want to break down why it’s such a massive failure, but I can’t without spoilers. All I can say is, there’s no logical reason given for why the ring virus was even possible in the first place. The question is asked, but the answer is “I don’t know.”

This book is a huge cop out written to undermine the apocalyptic buildup of the first two books. The explanation given for how the ring virus became a cancer doesn’t make sense, especially with the virus being coded from within a virtual reality simulation that was made to emulate our world exactly. Even when the scientists admit that such a thing as a psychically viral tape couldn’t have existed in the virtual reality, they give no explanation of how such an anomaly could have been introduced without an outside source. And the explanation for how the virus got out of the computer and mutated is just as poorly thought out. So there’s roughly 200 pages of dry medical lecturing leading up to a lot of shrugging and “I dunno” on the most important aspects of the plot twist.

Even if a better explanation had been given, the worst book’s offense is that it’s never scary, nor even creepy. At least with some bad books I feel something, even if it’s just boredom. But I felt nothing for this book until very close to the end. And the anger I felt was more about how this final book takes everything that was scary about the first two books and chucks them out a window in favor of a “one man saves the world” solution. It’s ludicrous, it doesn’t stack up even according to the new rules laid out by this book, and not one event is all that memorable because of the bored tone the narrator takes.

I can’t say there aren’t some interesting ideas about life in a virtual reality made to resemble our world and the cyclical nature of the universe. But those ideas are buried as marrow dust inside a dry bone, and I don’t feel like it was worth the effort of reading the book to explore those themes. I would much rather have read a bleak final entry that killed off the whole world with the ring virus than this denial of everything that happened in the first two books. In fact, this book ruins the series for me so much, I’m going to have to treat it like the Star Wars prequels and pretend they never existed. In my altered history, there was a third book where Sadako killed everyone, and the whole world ended. Boo-hoo. But my version is still a thousand times better than this book.

I give Loop two stars, and would only recommend it to readers of the first two books who feel a need to complete the series.